Child’s custody and guardianship facilitate implementation of child’s rights to protection, provision and involvement, when his/her parents are incapable or unwilling to assume this duty. One of the priority forms of child’s custody includes foster families, where an attempt is made to ensure such conditions which are needed for his/her physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development (Vaiko gerovės valstybės politikos koncepcija, Official Gazette, 30 05 2003, No. 52-2316). The goal of this article is to discuss peculiarities of child’s custody in a foster family. The first part deals with preconditions for foster family emergence, mechanisms of its establishment and financing; the second part of the article presents data of the empirical research, which reveal expression of foster parents’ competences fostering children.

In the article foster families are presented as participants of social relationship. Making references to content analysis of scientific literature, civil law, periodicals and pilot experiment the attitudes of participants of foster families to foster families as an institution, their mission and connections are revealed. Foster families are seen as an alternative to governmental institutional care and have all features of the third economical sector. In Lithuania foster families exist for more than 20 years, they have undergone many changes. The tendency of partnership was expressed recently by establishing associations of foster families, which represent cases of common interests. Associations do not only supply foster families with necessary information and educational support, but they have a potential to developing entrepreneurship.